The Wound-Up Nerd Chronicle

By

Alec Solomita

July 13, 2012 4:22 p.m. ET

In the 1979 Alan Pakula movie "Starting Over," a character played by Burt Reynolds suffers a panic attack in a furniture showroom at Bloomingdale's, drawing a small crowd of rubbernecks. When his brother turns to the onlookers and asks, "Does anyone have a Valium?," the group responds as one, reaching for pockets, purses and handbags, spurring the movie's biggest laugh. Anxiety, unlike its dour partner depression, is funny—a fact not lost on Daniel Smith, whose fluent and festive "Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety" plunders the disorder's humor with a bucaneer's bravado.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety each year. Its symptoms are countless, and Mr. Smith seem to have suffered them all, not only those familiar to many of us—fearfulness, sweating, indigestion, insomnia, self-consciousness—but also dizziness, numbness, blanching, blushing, nail-biting, brain fog, depersonalization, panic attacks and more. The causes of this common disorder are nearly as numerous as its symptoms but not so easy to pin down, although Mr. Smith's unrelenting self-examination makes a good start.

The author of "Monkey Mind" comes by his dysfunction honestly. "In his early forties, my father had a series of panic attacks that . . . sent him packing to the behavioral ward for a rest." Mr. Smith's mother "was scared of driving, public speaking, parties, open spaces, and men. . . . She suffered from acid indigestion, heart palpitations, and tremors. She had panic attacks at school. She also had panic attacks at home, at the grocery store, at the laundromat, at the bank, in the shower, and in bed."

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

By Daniel Smith

Simon & Schuster, 212 pages, $25

ENLARGE

David Gothard

Even if his neurotic pedigree weren't quite so impressive, certain events in Mr. Smith's life were so disturbing that they might well have spun even someone with a stronger constitution into emotional chaos. Mr. Smith is typically indecisive about the origins of his anxiety; his compulsive self-analysis swings monkey-like from one explanatory branch to another. He blames his genetics, his Jewishness (before Smith, the family name was Gomolski), his mother's work as a psychotherapist; but he also cites a near-drowning experience as a toddler that led to several childhood phobias. Without untangling this complex etiology, Mr. Smith does identify an event in his adolescence as the trigger to his first extended period of disabling anxiety. In the nightmarish, sordid episode that begins the book, Smith is the victim of a seduction, if not a rape, by a pair of older women. He relates the dismal experience with a comic gusto that sets the tone for the memoir.

"It all starts," he says, "with Esther." She is the instigator of the unwanted ménage à trois, a sad sack in her 20s who works alongside the 15-year-old Daniel at a bookstore, a woman whom he befriends despite the revulsion he feels toward her. Many of the people in Mr. Smith's memoir seem flat—which is perhaps unsurprising given the author's obsession with self—but the touching, odious Esther is a palpable presence as she insinuates herself into the innocent boy's life: "You're so mature! I keep having to remind myself you're only fifteen."

"I had neither the mental equipment nor the wish to become the confidant of an impoverished married lesbian," the adult Mr. Smith recalls. "I was in the school choir. I had a glow-in-the-dark retainer. My favorite band was the Eagles."

After he is lured into a debasing episode with the couple, the boy suffers an emotional free-fall, which Mr. Smith describes in wonderfully overwrought language. In English class, where once he flourished and now barely functions, he identifies with Macbeth (and wife): "My moist fingers pressing ghost prints into the cheap paperback, I looked down at the book and saw my reflection: a protagonist lousy with regret, desperate for calm, sleepless, self-torturing, self-isolating, self-warring, and so exquisitely tremulous that every slightest sound appalls him." He convinces himself he has contracted AIDS: "The thought would not leave me. I was going to die. I was sixteen and I had $7,500 in bar mitzvah money in the bank and I was going to die." For six months, he says, "I couldn't study, I couldn't think, I couldn't socialize. Most troubling of all, I couldn't laugh. . . . Then, at the start of my senior year, something bizarre happened: I recovered."

But the pattern has been set. Upon arriving at college, Mr. Smith suffers a second severe, extended bout of anxiety, which he describes with yet more histrionic aplomb. Anxiety "had transformed my appearance as thoroughly as if I'd swallowed Jekyll's potion. My back was knotted and hunched, my shoulders were up to my ears, my skin was pallid and clammy, my cheeks were gaunt, and my fingertips were torn and scabbed from my gnawing at them day and night." The school's therapist is, like most therapists he encounters, useless.

With precision, sympathy and humor, Mr. Smith continues to chronicle his myriad symptoms into adulthood—although eventually humor trumps all. Other than Esther and the author's own monkey of a mind, his characterizations are often more suited to a sitcom than a memoir. His mother is a cartoon of a Jewish mother. He and his best friend, fellow neurotic Kate, sound like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton doing "Seinfeld."

"And today," Daniel says on the phone, "I don't know how to write. I literally can't write a sentence! It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke?"

"I don't think you've had a stroke."

"But how do you know?" . . .

"What are the symptoms of a stroke?"

"I don't know. Look them up!" . . .

"OK. Hold on . . . OK. . . . Do you have trouble speaking?"

"I have trouble speaking intelligently."

"Do you have trouble seeing?"

"Umm . . . yes. But I think my contacts are just dried out."

"Do you have a headache?"

"Yes!"

"Did it come out of nowhere?" . . .

"No. I've had it since February."

In addition to being riddled with anxiety, Daniel Smith is a remorseless exhibitionist. In tandem with his nakedly intimate writing on anxiety, he has a hilariously narcissistic website called "The Monkey Mind Chronicles," which includes videos of reports on his latest therapy and his latest apprehensions and advice from his therapist mom. And though he claims to be strife-avoidant ("I wasn't Christopher Hitchens. I took no pleasure in controversy"), he repeatedly flings himself or stumbles into conflict: his headstrong breakup with a lovely girlfriend; his mishandling of an article he writes for the Atlantic, for which he and the magazine were briefly sued; his recent blog post for the New York Times about Jews and anxiety, which provoked a hurricane of outraged responses.

He's not likely to spark such anger with "Monkey Mind." The book, despite Mr. Smith's showy self-laceration, is entertaining, instructive—and it is possibly even healing, even though, as the author writes early on: "This is no recovery memoir, let me warn you now."

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